Null controllability of von Kármán thermoelastic plates under the clamped or free mechanical boundary conditions

In this paper, we provide results of local and global null controllability for 2-D thermoelastic systems, in the absence of rotational inertia, and under the influence of the (nonLipschitz) von Kármán nonlinearity. The plate component may be taken to satisfy either the clamped or higher order (and physically relevant) free boundary conditions. In the accompanying analysis, critical use is made of sharp observability estimates which obtain for the linearization of the thermoelastic plate (these being derived in [G. Avalos, I. Lasiecka, The null controllability of thermoelastic plates and singularity of the associated minimal energy function, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 294 (2004) 34–61] and [G. Avalos, I. Lasiecka, Asymptotic rates of blowup for the minimal energy function for the null controllability of thermoelastic plates: The free case, in: Proc. of the Conference for the Control of Partial Differential Equations, Georgetown University, Dekker, in press]). Moreover, another key ingredient in our work to steer the given nonlinear dynamics is the recent result in [A. Favini, M.A. Horn, I. Lasiecka, D. Tataru, Addendum to the paper: Global existence, uniqueness and regularity of solution to a von Kármán system with nonlinear boundary dissipation, Differential Integral Equations 10 (1997) 197–200] concerning the sharp regularity of the von Kármán nonlinearity.